Cloud Computing in Layman’s language. (funny but off color warning)

YouTube ^ | 10/7/2018 | Graduate School of Management

[Robert DeLong]

Thought perhaps some might enjoy this. It's a comedy routine about cloud computing.

[zeugma]

I remember when the cloud first came out, when is go to professional seminars they were always pushing it. Why? I thought. Seemed like a terrible idea.

What is old is new again. Way back in the dark ages, we had mainframes. All data was centralized, and you had dedicated connections to it. Security and data integrity were handled by professionals whose job it was to do so.

Then came the PC era, and things got a lot more decentralized. Unfortunately, security and data integrity were not really considered so much in this, and we had a lot of problems with both.

Now things are swinging back to a more centralized situation. Unfortunately, rather than using one big box to manage these things, we have thousands of small ones. From what I've seen security is spotty. Worse, you don't actually own those servers the way you would have when it was in your own datacenter. (Talk to folks at Parlor who got completely deplatformed by Amazon.)

Basically the cloud is just someone else's computer that you rent. You don't really control anything that is not in your possession, but no one who matters seems to care. Personally, I don't really know how even large corps that have serious resources can think this is a good thing.

[COBOL2Java]

Where is “the cloud”?

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has them all over the world.

In each major metropolitan area, there are at least 2 server farms (more often 3 or more), in disparate sections of the region. They are synchronized so that if one goes down, another picks up the slack.

[SecondAmendment]

> I can’t believe people voluntarily decided to trust putting their company data in unknown locations, on somebody else’s computer.

It can be a couple of orders of magnitude cheaper than setting up your own data centers and infrastructure, but there are a lot of caveats :

• You have a solution which actually needs to run 24/7
• The solution is architected to "expand and contract" according to load, i.e. it can go from one server to ten and then down to one as needed automatically.
• You have staff and management who can support this type of solution, and understand there are growing pains with optimization.
• The solution is architected so that it can be switched from one cloud provider to another in a matter of minutes to hours.
• You have a good working relationship with the various cloud vendors used

Its a tall order, but if done properly a 24/7 solution with multi-regional presence can be had at a very reasonable cost.